New Model Design Dairy - Elephant - Part 1

Elephants have been a symbol of wisdom, strength, stability, loyalty, intelligence and many other positive attributes. It is also a symbol of good luck with it's trunk in upright position that some homes display a pair of elephants.

Started design work on elephant automata to add on to our series of Lucky Automata range ( lucky cat, lucky dog, lucky star ).

Picture show the 2nd model that we made after correcting sizes & shapes of some of the parts.

The elephant automata model is to knee with the back legs and raise its head and trunk at the same time. It will require 2 CAMs to drive to drive the various part of the body.

Once the elephant body & head design are done, will move on to work on the back legs (which need to kneel) and the mechanism ............ (to be continued)

Making Automata Box Part 2

Using double-sided tape and color paper, we cover the white foam and touch-up on the box .

Take note of the circular hole that was cutout earlier to allow extension of the handle. We use a wooden stick.

The box is now completed and we might need to add labeling to it.

THis is the picture of GoldFish automata inside the box together with Dream Butterfly & KuFu Mei Mei.

May be we will try to make a cylinder box for the next model.....
Hope you like this box making post and give us any suggestion or comment.

Thanks.
Ren

Making Automata display box

CeraCera will be invited for a small exhibition in an art & design activity and we are to showcase some of the models of our choice.



The first thing that come to mind is the need to design and make casing to house the fragile Paper Automata models. The casing will need to be transparent , able to protect the model and at the same time, allow visitor to turn the handle and view the automata action. So we start our journey in search for a suitable casing. After checking in the market, there is no such casing off the shelve and we decided to make it ourselve...........

Step One :
We found the thick plastic sheet from the local art&craft shop which is transparent and hard. We grab some.....including the foam sheet (1.2cm thick).



Need to consider how big the box need to be , including room for the automata motion that will probably beyond the base box.... plus some room on top to make it look nicer :-).


After the dimenion is fixed, we start cutting the plastic sheet. See figure below.








Next , cut out from the foam sheet and color paper, glue the color paper to the foam using double-sided tape.




Noticed that we cut out a circular hole from the plastic sheet, this is to allow rotation of the handle to take place.









Step 2 :


We secured the automata model to the foam using bluetac , double-sided tape, glue etc... to ensure the model is firmly, very firmly , attached to the base. This is important so that the automata is firm when any one turn the handle as they are not able to hold the model after putting it inside the box.


See the box before touch-up and additional color paper :







To be continued............

Star behind the KOI model

Idea & star behind the KOI Model

There was a pond next to our studio which has been a source of inspiration of our KOI model. The pond has quite a number of Koi fish and it is really a joy just to watch them swimming around. We decided to design a KOI model after observing them for a number a days making sure the movment /automata mechanism are similar. We also need to be sure that we can design a paper model/sculpture that show the beauty of a KOI.

Designing a beautiful and realistic looking KOI paper model was the difficult part compare to the automata mechanism (but we prefer to have a real-looking model rather than a sketch model of a KOI). About 5 to 6 revision change on the paper model itself to achieve that.

We have been coming back to the pond several time to observe the head, body, tail, dimension ration, scale, color of the Koi. Thanks to this pond !

This is the pond and can you recognise the star behind our model?

This is one of the discarded earlier Koi paper model:

KOI

We have just completed a new automata model : KOI . It has been quite a while as we received feedback and suggestion to have a Koi Fish automata after we released our goldfish. We are fascinated by this very graceful fish that symbolish courage, wealth & prosperity in some countries. After observing this fish , we modified the existing goldfish to creat this KOI model. We have since made about 5 revision change in order to create a realistic anf beautiful KOI fish.

The earlier models either look too fat or not graceful enough.
We love this koi and we hope you like it too.

More images at our website www.ceracera.com

CeraCera NEW Models ....Almost ready.

We having been working on about 6 ~ 7 new models concurrently in the past few mths..... It has never been so fun before as all the new design /concept/ideas were floating in our minds all day long...... intoxicated with Automata Magic. Nevertheless, we sincerely hope our automata will make people happy .... especially during this financial crisis .








These are three of the models that were completed and undering final checking. We have re-designed the cover pages .


GoldFish - We re-design the popular GoldFish and is currently designing another one for Koi-lover (Koi model ).


KungFu Mei - "Mei" in Chinese mean young sister and we love this model. Turn the handle, the KungFu Mei will start practicing .

Dream Butterfly - This is the butterfly that appears in our dream. We completed this model quite some time back and finally done up the final version.

We will be publishing design notes of these models in the next few blog entries and hopefully adding some animation and pictures in the blog.

Happy New Year!

Happy Automata - Dream Butterfly part II

After doing some www search on butterfly, we have eventually found the one that we like and and the look alike of our dream butterfly.

The concept of the mechanism drawing was completed and prototype building started. Modified and redrawn the various pieces along the way, the photo show the 3rd revision of the draft and mock up. The star mark on the box is the location that we plan to have the flowers & leaves.

These 2 images give you the idea of the movement when the butterfly flapping her wings.

Some fine tuning needed to smoothen the movement and depict the graceful butterfly flap.

Summer break

Just realise the animation of the Aquashark did not work in the previous post. Thus, we post it here again and hope it works.





Looks like we might not be able to complete the Aquashar instruction on time before the planned summer holiday break. We will be away for 2 wks for holiday and probably continue our work after we are back. Hope to capture more automata ideas along the way.

Enjoy.

CeraCera - the Automata People
We simply love designing Automata and can never have enough of it!
We even dream Automata!